The reason for existence for any organization is the production of goods and services. Therefore, operations play a central role in any organizations because it produces goods and services. To better understand the meaning of operations we must examine organizations functions and distinguish the relationship between them.
All organizations have marketing, accounting & finance and products / services development functions. These functions are known as major which are supported by human resources, purchasing and engineering support functions. Thus, organization functions have activities which are somewhat interrelated in a way which makes it complicated to identify operation function boundaries. To better understand where operation function starts and where it ends or in other words operations boundaries, we can define it as all excluded activities shared with other function. This definition is knows as narrow because it separates operations function from all other functions which is unrealistic in today’s organizations. The broad definition however, included all activities which had connections with producing goods or services. This means that marketing, selling and accounting core activities are excluded.
After defining operations function and distinguishing its boundaries with other organization’s functions we will need to understand how operations produce goods or services? The answer to this question is that operations produces goods and services by changing the resources condition to something else. Any organization has inputs which are transformed to an output through a process. This transformation is better described as a model which is called the transformation process model.
Within the transformation process model, inputs are reshaped into output through a transformation process. Inputs to any organization are either transformed resources or transforming resources. The transformed resources